#doreiku

It’s probably no secret by now that I love:

Edgy-ass anime bullshit

Competition animes with high stakes

Righteous revenge stories

So hey! An anime about people who are willingly risking their own enslavement in a series of different games? Sounds fucked up and intense...

GUESS I’M IN!

This thing came out in Spring 2018. It deals with a device called the “SCM”  which is worn like a retainer. It taps into the user’s nervous system, making it so any challenge or game between two SCM users becomes binding. The loser becomes enslaved to the winner, bound to do anything they are ordered to do.... with some exceptions (the loser cannot be made to kill themselves or to hurt their master, to cite two examples).

Of course, you don’t have to keep the loser as your personal servant or whatever; the option always exists to verbally “release” them from any eventual servitude. In practice, though, this doesn’t really occur. People are too corrupt to allow their “assets” to go free.

Let’s not beat around the bush: This concept is VERY dark and has a lot of GROSS sexual/rapey implications to it. The very first episode literally opens with a teaser scene where someone uses the device to make someone verbally agree to sex - so, y’know, that’s already some psychological torture and if he follows through and does it, that’s clearly rape - though we are gratefully spared the pain of seeing ANY part of what presumably followed.

Fucking THANKFULLY,  the first episode is also the worst I’ve seen in this department. I’m now halfway through the series, and although a lot of people have been manipulated into doing jobs or physical tasks against their will, the literal rapeiness is far, far behind us. There’s also no sexualization of the worst elements at this point — in spite of the manga covers that depict characters bound up in BDSM gear, it’s purely metaphorical. Which isn’t to say that making people perform jobs or tasks that physically harm them or that they just don’t wanna do isn’t a giant form of violation, but... well. We’ve met a lot of characters in this unnamed Japanese city, and at least up until now, none of the ones involved in the “game” are portrayed as enjoying their subjugation (though we certainly have to deal with ‘masters’ who are taking far too much pleasure in their power).

Our unlikely heroine is Eia, an isolated and cynical 20-year-old who is struggling with her detachment from reality, emotions, and basically everything. Through a series of events, she becomes aware of the existence of the SCM and agrees to become the ‘insurance partner” to a user of the device. In essence, she is given control of a large sum of money and an extra SCM; if the person in question is enslaved, she’s expected to free them using what she has.

Eia begins the series as someone who just wants to observe the sick game and find out what her own limits are as a person. The thrill of watching the games and coping with her own feelings are all she’s interested in when we start out. Even so, despite her insistence that she doesn’t care about anything, she is swift to step in to take care of her friend in the first ep, so it seems like she might be denying her innate goodness. And sure enough, it isn’t long into the series when she finds a feeling she can’t ignore: disgust towards the entire concept of enslavement and manipulation.

Other characters are gradually introduced who have one of the 24 devices floating around the city. Each character wearing one gets a 10-minute origin story at some point in the series, which said character narrates. These explain how their life brought them into the circle of the SCM game.  And naturally, all of the characters begin colliding with one another as we advance. Along the way, we also learn the relatively innocuous origins of the device and gets hints as to how it became this black-market high-dollar object of fear.

Hopefully, this doesn’t all collapse in the back half of the series, because the first six episodes have given me a lot of suspense and intensity and engaging characters. There’s not a ton of humor, but there ARE formerly victimized women getting brutal revenge on men, and I kinda have a thing for that, so I’ve had adequate reasons to smile :P

Oh, and one of the users is a dog.

Which means we get a ten-minute story narrated by a dog.

Today’s anime dog of the day is:

Dorei-ku The Animation

Rating: 2/3

Categories: drama, dub, gambling, high stakes, manga adaptation, physical abuse, psychological, seinen, s/exual abuse, s/exual content, thriller

There’s a new piece of technology that if you’re wearing it and lose a game you become the slave of the winner. Shady underground and a healthy dose of revenge. You can imagine how messed up it gets.